Karen Jungblut has been associated with the USC Shoah Foundation since 1996. She has played a key role in indexing the video testimony archive material held by the foundation as well as implementing the Dimensions in Testimony project. She has also developed testimony collection programs with partners in Africa, Asia, and Central America
and until autumn 2023 served as the European Representative of this institution.
The USC Shoah Foundation has developed a substantial visual history archive since 1994. Their database now contains 55,561 testimonies in forty-five different languages
from sixty-five countries. Additionally, 700,000 photographs depicting survivors' life stories before, during, and after the Holocaust are available on the platform. The two million names represented in the archive include survivors, their family members, and others mentioned in their testimonies. The foundation's mission is to collect and conduct video testimonies
of Holocaust survivors worldwide. These testimonies have been indexed, cataloged,
and made available on their website. Survivors provided their testimonies to leave
a personal legacy for their children, grandchildren, as well as for educational and research purposes worldwide.
Within this digital archive, we can search testimonies according to a number of different criteria. For example the database can be searched by keywords, names, places, subjects, languages, etc. While watching a testimony, the user also has access to more detailed segments of the video. Each segment includes different terms or people discussed
in the interview that can be clicked on to access that section of the interview. Under
the video, one can search the bio profile of the interviewee, diverse subject terms, people they are discussing, and a map of the places the survivor is evoking. If needed,
the transcript of the entire testimony is also available under the segments section for most of the testimonies.
The importance of video testimonies is that you watch the survivor, him or herself, tell
the story directly to you. We had a researcher very early on. One of the USC Shoah coordinators in Sweden was writing her PhD in psychology, and at the time, she was using transcripts that we created of child survivors from Sweden for her research. She also did research on child survivors from the genocide in Rwanda. Initially, she only used
the transcripts to start writing her PhD and her work. Then she began to think, ‘Well, maybe I should also watch the testimonies,’ so we provided her with copies for her research. When she came back, she said that now she also understands the power of watching testimonies because she was rewriting her research that was based 'only' on the words, so to speak. When she started to watch, she noticed the different mannerisms, the silences,
the connotations of the voice, and the facial expressions. She began to think differently about what is being discussed and how it's being discussed. The information conveyed through visual communication became very important, and that became evident
in the testimonies.